


Immortan Joe & Fertility

by mx_vertiginous



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Infertility, Meta, Miscarriage, Nonfiction, Other, Stillbirth, Warning: Immortan Joe, pregnancy loss, tumblr purge
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-20 19:19:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,166
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17028486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mx_vertiginous/pseuds/mx_vertiginous
Summary: A couple of analyses of Immortan Joe's pathetic reproductive outcomes.





	1. Chapter 1

I’ve been giving some serious thought to the idea that maybe the problem with Joe’s offspring is Joe. I’ve had this thought a lot and I keep turning it around in my head. A month or so ago, I had the idea that maybe it would be a side effect of medication he’s on for his health issues (methotrexate would be a hypothesis), but it wouldn’t really add up to a huge magnitude of birth defects & pregnancy loss. Then I was thinking about Rh factors, but while the numbers are better, they still don’t quite add up. 

Then I remembered Kell antibodies resulting in hemolytic disease of the newborn. I am going to do some actual math on this later tonight, but it carries some real promise as an explanation for why Joe is unable to father many children that survive past infancy. If Joe was Kell1+ (especially if he was homozygous for +) like 9% of the population is, and the majority of his wives were Kell1- we could likely see a situation with repeated miscarriages, stillbirths and infant deaths. In a Kell1- mother who’s never had a blood transfusions the first pregnancy would go along just fine. But once that mother has been exposed to Kell1+ blood (which can happen during labor and delivery if the mother and fetus are discordant), things go very wrong in subsequent pregnancies with Kell1+ fetuses. So pregnancy #1 has the normal rate of pregnancy failure or malformation of any other pregnancy in the wasteland (which we’ll all agree is higher than the modern pre-apocalypse, lets guess at 20%???). Pregnancy #2 you take that 80% of successful pregnancies and then start rolling the dice on questions like whether mom was exposed, how likely it is that the child is + (Joe being homozygous would make that more likely), how high mom’s antibody titer is, etc… 

No, nevermind, I don’t have to do the actual math… someone already did it for King Henry XII [https://phys.org/news/2011-03-puzzle-henry-viii.html]. (Ignore the McLeod syndrome issue in this case, it can occur in those with Kell1+, but it is rare.) 

“The precise number of miscarriages endured by Henry’s reproductive partners is difficult to determine, especially when various mistresses are factored in, but the king’s partners had a total of at least 11 and possibly 13 or more pregnancies. Only four of the eleven known pregnancies survived infancy. Whitley and Kramer call the high rate of spontaneous late-term abortion, stillbirth, or rapid neonatal death suffered by Henry’s first two queens “an atypical reproductive pattern” because, even in an age of high child mortality, most women carried their pregnancies to term, and their infants usually lived long enough to be christened.”


	2. The Tally

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Based on information from the interview with Lesley Vanderwalt, Oscar/BAFTA winning make-up artist on Mad Max Fury Road. https://makeupmag.com/exclusive-artist-narrated-video-for-mad-max-fury-road/

Another medical head canon post coming at you, dealing once again with Immortan Joe’s reproductive outcomes.

As noted in the make-up artist videos, the tic marks on the Organic Mechanic’s hand indicate “The tally of the Immortan’s heirs he had delivered that did not survive” and the number is 72 (73 based on my count from a close-up where he is tattooing Max, but I may be miscounting a tattoo ink smudge, so we’ll go with 72). Let’s make some assumptions, and do some math, and look at some pretty stunning numbers.

The main assumption I’m going to work with here is that Organic is probably in his early 40′s (which puts him a little older than Angus Sampson), and I’m going to guess at a round number that he’s been Joe’s primary obstetrician for about 20 years. Any number smaller than that would get into numbers that are truly weird.

The wording of the phrase “heirs he had delivered” makes me think that the tally is only of male sons born at full term. Because Joe would not have considered a female child that he delivered as an “heir.” So, adding in Corpus, Rictus & Scrotus, we have a nice round 75 sons. Given a worldwide ratio of male:female births of 107:100 that gives us roughly 70 daughters, and a total of 145 births. Over 20 years that gives us an average yearly birthrate of 7.25 babies. Given that each child requires 9 months gestation, and even if the baby dies a mother might not regain her fertility for about 6 months (give or take), we’ll assume that Joe’s wives are getting pregnant every 15 months, or a little less than once a year. By that calculation, Joe must have had a staggering number of wives in the vault, probably on average of about 9 wives at any one time for the full 20 year timespan (or about 45 wives total during Organic’s tenure). And that’s assuming that he’s fairly fertile himself between the ages of 45-65, which is a stretch. [”increasing male age is associated with increased time to conception”]

Option two would be that “heirs he had delivered” includes both full term babies and miscarriages (I’m going to discount stillbirths because the numbers are very low and most of them would be at a stage where external genitalia would not be obvious). This number would be a little more reasonable. Let’s take a high rate of miscarriage (because of the polluted wasteland) of 20 percent of pregnancies before 20 weeks. That would result in 15 miscarriages at indeterminate sex, 60 male heirs, and 56 female babies, for a total of 131 births, or about 6.55 births per year. That’s still pretty high.

If we switch our thinking around to “babies he had delivered” then the number drops to 75, which is a birthrate of 3.75 over 20 years, pretty good for an older dude, but still reasonable with about 4-6 wives in the Vault at one time (or about 25 total wives). Especially since the comic implies that Organic is closely monitoring their fertility which would improve on Joe’s problems with “increasing male age.”

But here’s the thing with that. If we change the wording of the entire statement “The tally of the Immortan’s heirs he had delivered that did not survive” to “The tally of the Immortan’s babies he had delivered that did not survive” we have to conclude that there were not really a bunch of healthy daughters running around The Citadel. 

Based on my previous post about Kell antibodies and pregnancy outcomes, if Kell+ was Joe’s problem (as is hypothesized with Henry VIII), then the first pregnancies of those 45 or 25 women would have a survival rate as high as any other baby in the wasteland. With Joe we’re looking at 3 surviving sons. Maybe another 3-4 daughters that would have survived to adulthood. That’s at best a reproductive success rate of 7/25 or 28% of unaffected pregnancies (assuming that all living babies came from first pregnancies), and an overall reproductive success rate of about 9% of all pregnancies. 

Now these numbers are pretty fast and loose and I made a lot of guesses and estimations, but still. That’s pretty miserable.


End file.
